Oracle Adds Database Backup, Storage to Cloud Services Slate

Posted on April 14, 2014 By Pedro Hernandez

Oracle today launched two new services, Database Backup and Storage Cloud, that not only expand the business software maker's enterprise cloud services portfolio, but also offer Oracle-based environments a one-stop shortcut to cloud-based data protection.

Oracle Database Backup Service, nestled under the company's platform-as-a-service (PaaS) umbrella, provides businesses with a public cloud component for their database backup and recovery strategies. At a cost of $33 per terabyte (TB) per month, businesses get automatic three-way data mirroring on an unlimited number of backups.

Moreover, Oracle Database Backup Service brings with it native support for the company's data protection software. The product is tightly integrated with Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN), boasts the company. An add-on called the Database Backup Cloud Module is required, and can be downloaded from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) website.

Integrating Database Backup Service into a backup strategy is a practically seamless affair for current customers (Oracle Database Versions 10.2 and higher). Administrators can call up "familiar RMAN commands" to seamlessly perform backup and recovery operations. Further, Oracle admins can "parallelize and compress backup data transfers to help maximize performance," said the company.

Client-side encryption keeps data secure. According to Oracle, backups are "encrypted at the source with keys kept locally, optionally compressed, securely transmitted to the cloud which enables end-to-end security, reliability and data protection."

The company also launched a generalized enterprise cloud storage offering named, simply, Oracle Storage Cloud. It pits the company against major cloud providers including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and scores of startups.

The object storage solution, part of Oracle's infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) slate, costs $30 per TB per month. Storage Cloud can accommodate objects as large as 5 TB. Data can be accessed by employing a RESTful API or a Java client.

Like Database Backup, the solution mirrors data to three machines in the same data center. On the security front, it supports 2048 bit RSA KeyPair encryption, which customers implement and manage.

Both Oracle Database Backup and Storage Cloud are a sign of the enterprise storage times, suggested Chris Pinkham, senior vice president of Product Development at Oracle, in prepared remarks. "There is also a huge push to migrate existing on-premises workloads to the public cloud and support portability between on-premises and cloud environments."

His company's new offerings "are based on open standards, integrated to work together seamlessly, and designed to support full portability between on-premises and cloud environments," he added.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.